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Defense Business Alert

Defense industrial base officials from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada met in Washington today to discuss transnational security cooperation, but were leery of weighing in on potential disruptions caused by President Trump's new tariffs on steel and aluminum.

The head of Forcepoint's global governments unit is seeking to grow the company's longstanding work in cross-domain and insider threat work, while also building its more traditional cybersecurity business in critical networks and other areas.

The task force leading a new defense industrial base review recently held an "interim readout" of the effort's initial findings, according to the principal deputy director of the Pentagon's manufacturing and industrial base policy shop.

While the Pentagon agrees that imports of steel and aluminum "impair" national security, it has warned that trade restrictions stemming from the Commerce Department Section 232 investigations could harm relationships with key allies.

The Navy has awarded conceptual design contracts to Austal USA, Fincantieri Marinette Marine, General Dynamics Bath Iron Works, Huntington Ingalls Industries and Lockheed Martin at $14.9 million apiece for the guided missile frigate replacement program, as it readies to later down select to one vendor.

L3 Technologies was one of the first to sell off its services business, spinning off what's now Engility in 2012. Lockheed Martin followed suit in 2016, divesting itsinformation systems and global solutions unit.

The Defense Department has awarded a contract worth up to $950 million for cloud services to an Amazon Web Services partner, but says the award is unrelated to a high-level steering group's plans for accelerating cloud adoption across the department.

The Defense Department approved waivers totaling nearly $16 billion in nonrecurring costs that would have been charged to foreign countries buying U.S. weapons over the past six years, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Government contracting attorneys and advocates say a provision in the Fiscal Year 2018 National Defense Authorization Act on lobbying by former government officials is more restrictive than previous regulations and might surprise defense contractors.